POP MUSIC : This Time With Smiles and XXXs : By the late ‘80s, X was worn down by radio’s resistance and the city that once inspired them. Now that alternative rock has stormed the airwaves, L.A.’s poets of punk give it another shot: new album, same quirky vision

When the four members of X--arguably the most influential band to come out of Los Angeles in the ‘80s--got back together after a three-year sabbatical at the end of 1990 to play four holiday season concerts, they didn’t know that they were starting their long-awaited reunion.

But when the shows sold out, and the audience proved to be young and enthusiastic, something clicked.

“At that moment, we realized that X was relevant,” says the group’s singer and bassist John Doe. “We realized that X was speaking to anybody who cared to listen, that it didn’t have to be someone from 1978. And that’s encouraging, to realize that you’re communicating.”

In the wake of the shows, record companies came courting, and X eventually signed a multi-album deal with the London-based Big Time Records, which has a U.S. distribution arrangement with the major label Mercury Records. “Hey Zeus,” the band’s first album of new material in six years, will finally come out on June 8. The band will play at a KROQ-sponsored festival on June 12 at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.

In the time between the reunion shows and the album’s release, X received welcome encouragement in the form of the commercial breakthrough of Nirvana and the alternative-rock bands that followed it onto the radio and into the charts. It suggested to X that the group wouldn’t encounter the same obstacles that finally wore the members down during their first go-round.

“There’s a musical context now, and you can do it rather than being a complete outsider and having no place to go,” says Doe, sitting with singer Exene Cervenka in an East Hollywood restaurant at the end of a day of interviews and photo sessions to promote “Hey Zeus.”

“It was kind of heartbreaking at times because it was so difficult,” says Cervenka, recalling X’s career-long battle against radio’s indifference. “People were so resistant to something and so afraid of something that wasn’t going to hurt them.

“You want to be creative and you want to be inspired and you want to do things that inspire other people. And if you keep coming up against the wall, and that’s making you discouraged or uninspired or uncreative, then you have to get away from that and go in another direction until you get back at least the courage to go at that wall again.”

*

She had to leave Los Angeles . . .

She found it hard to say goodby to her own best friend . . .

It felt sad

She had to get out

--From X’s “Los Angeles”

*

Doe and Cervenka, who wrote that L.A.-burnout anthem during the late-’70s punk days, eventually lived out the lyric: After X stopped performing in 1988, Doe moved to a ranch 80 miles north of town, and Cervenka relocated to Idaho.

“The way I feel about Los Angeles is that at some point in about ’87 it ceased to be inspiring,” Doe says.

He remains a long-range commuter when it’s time to record or do business, but Cervenka, finding it impossible to conduct a career from Idaho, moved back.

“I want to be where the people I want to be with are,” says Cervenka, whose conversation tends to drill right to the point. “That’s more important right now than where I live.

“When you get away from L.A. because you can’t take it anymore and then you get back, you appreciate certain things about it that can kind of be depressing if you’re in it too much.”

Cervenka’s repatriation serves as a neat symbol for the return of X, which muscled its way out of the city’s punk-rock scene and became the heir to such culture-defining Los Angeles forebears as the Beach Boys and the Doors.

Besides crafting a series of essential, critically acclaimed albums, the group set a standard for independent vision, artistry and integrity.

In songs such as “Sex and Dying in High Society,” “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene” and “Los Angeles,” the band documented its adopted city’s psychological terrain with an unflinching realism and poetic reach.

X began in 1977 when bassist Doe, newly arrived in L.A. from Baltimore, hooked up with Billy Zoom, a rockabilly guitarist who had recently fallen under the spell of the Ramones. Doe had become involved with Cervenka, whom he had met at a poetry workshop at the Venice arts center Beyond Baroque, and she was soon the singer in the nascent group. The lineup was completed when they replaced their first drummer with D. J. Bonebrake, whom they recruited from a band called the Eyes (whose Charlotte Caffey would later join the Go-Go’s).

X had a musical head start on most of its fellow punk-rock bands: Doe had played in bar bands, Zoom was an experienced guitarist, and Bonebrake was a versatile, formally trained drummer who had played everything from big band to classical. Cervenka was unschooled as a singer, but she was a compelling presence, and her dissonant wail blended intriguingly with Doe’s deep croon.

But it was the vision that the music supported that struck a nerve.

“I think they brought harmony and a sort of poetic sense to punk,” says Bob Biggs, owner of Slash Records, the small L.A. label that released X’s first two albums.

“I think their ability lyrically was in a much different plane from most bands of that or this age. . . . They shed a lot of different angles of light on a particular subject.”

Doe and Cervenka’s lyrics captured the texture of a turbulent subculture and the city that bred it, and they spoke powerfully to their audience, articulating the attitudes of a punk community that took refuge in shared values of creativity and independence.

“A lot of the people were from broken families,” recalls the unfailingly friendly Bonebrake, 37, sitting with X’s current guitarist, Tony Gilkyson, in a Hollywood restaurant not far from the site of the Masque, the legendary basement club that was the center of L.A.’s punk-rock activity.

“Joining a scene like that is not really a natural thing to do,” he continued. “It’s something you have to get out of your system. I think a lot of people who were into that scene had no other alternatives.”

“It was a community of necessity, huddled together in fear of what was around it,” Slash’s Biggs observes. “And from that came all these great bands and all this great thinking.”

When Slash released X’s debut, “Los Angeles,” in 1980, the band was cast as a standard-bearer for the uprising against the status quo of ‘70s rock. The group soon transcended punk’s orthodoxy and regimentation, broadening the range of its music to embrace elements of folk, country and blues.

Blending Woody Guthrie populism, rock roots, punk aggression and bohemian sensibility, X created powerful art out of the turbulence of America’s social currents and the group’s personal lives--Doe and Cervenka’s creative partnership has survived the 1984 dissolution of their five-year marriage.

X made the move to the major label Elektra in 1982, and in 1983’s ambitious album “More Fun in the New World” the band expanded its canvas to depict a deep discontent beneath the surface optimism of the Reagan era.

X was widely acknowledged as one of the most artistically potent groups in America, and it became as big as a cult band could be. But despite the accolades and its importance in the lives of its audience, X couldn’t break through radio’s resistance to unconventional music.

Says Cervenka: “I think the discouragement factor came not from not getting rich and famous so much as being denied credibility on a human level, a level of basic dignity.

“When you think about getting on the radio, the first thing that comes into your mind isn’t royalties, it’s people are hearing your song in their car. And if people are preventing you from being able to communicate with people, people that you know would get something out of your stuff, you feel that it’s unjust.”

Zoom left the band in 1985 and was replaced by Dave Alvin, who had made a reputation as a sterling songwriter and guitarist with the roots-rock group the Blasters. Gilkyson, who had played with erstwhile “cowpunk” group Lone Justice, came aboard in ‘86, and for nearly a year X was fueled by two energetic, versatile, roots-conscious guitarists. X became a quartet again after Alvin left in ‘87, and X released its last studio album, “See How We Are,” the same year.

X ended its initial run in 1988, when it released a live album recorded at the Whisky. After that, Doe made a solo album for Geffen Records and got an acting career in gear. Cervenka did spoken-word records and performances, published books of poetry, did some acting and released two albums of solo music. She also became involved with the Bohemian Women’s Political Alliance, an L.A.-based activist organization.

Bonebrake became a drummer for hire, working with everyone from L.A. roots-rock bands to such popsters as Michael Penn (on a show at the Roxy billed as “Break D. J. Bonebrake Night,” he played with four different L.A. bands). Gilkyson, 40, played with a variety of L.A. musicians and produced both of Cervenka’s albums.

The new “Hey Zeus” album contains unmistakable X signatures--the surging instrumental attack, Doe and Cervenka’s curdled harmonies--along with some new wrinkles.

“We had all experimented with a bunch of different bands,” Gilkyson says, “and we decided that once we got back together again we were gonna do some stuff that was a little more dissonant; we were gonna try stuff where we improvised. I think that was a direct result of playing with other bands and being exposed to other musicians.”

Adds Bonebrake: “We tried not to repeat what we did. Except in one case. . . . We couldn’t figure out how to make a particular song work. We tried everything. We were saying, ‘Well maybe we should put some acoustic guitars on this, or slow it down.’ Finally Exene turned around at rehearsal and said, ‘Why don’t we play it like X?’ And that was it.”

How much interest will there be in a new album from X, a band that never got higher than No. 76 on the charts and hasn’t released a record of new material in six years?

“I think because Exene Cervenka and John Doe have both stayed around and released things, and Exene’s done her poetry stuff, that it’s not as much a ‘Who’s that?’ sort of thing as most bands would be coming back,” says Megan McLaughlin, music editor of the CMJ New Music Report, a weekly trade publication that tracks college and alternative music.

“Also, they’ve reached punk-rock folklore status. Unlike a lot of bands, they haven’t gotten the tag of having sold out or anything like that, so they’ll be able to survive.”

That was something that was on the members’ minds when they reconvened.

“We wanted to make sure it was vital and it wasn’t just a revival show,” Bonebrake says. “I think when we did the shows we realized it was more than fun. We felt renewed and we felt excited about doing it. I think it was more a labor of love than a last desperate attempt to cash in.”

For Cervenka, a key element was the ascendance of Nirvana and the new breed of bands that followed it into mass popularity in the past few years.

“It has to do with feeling less isolated and feeling a little more joyous about doing that kind of creativity. It was like doing something new. There was a feeling of freedom that I had lost in the last couple of years with X.”

Doe and Cervenka both decline to give their ages, but the available data would put him near 40, and she thinks she was born the same day as Johnny Rotten, which would make her 37. Both are married with children (three for Doe, one for Cervenka).

But despite the changes in their lives and in the culture, they believe that X’s creative mission remains unchanged.

“Your art reflects what goes on in your life,” Cervenka says. “That’s not age-based. . . . You know, life goes on and things change and you try to make sense of it for people who can’t express it. It isn’t all just about your life. It’s about everybody’s lives and about the situation in general and what’s going on in the world and the country and the city and the neighborhood.”

Do they consider themselves optimistic about the situation in general?

“Yeah, in general,” says Doe. “I consider myself a realist, but . . . “

Cervenka cuts in: “People mistake optimism for falseness, denial, Pollyanna-ism, That’s not optimism, that’s denial. You have to be a realist before you can really have hope.”